Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
History is not a morality play, even though on occasion it is taught as one. Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker isn’t so much a traditional book as a collage of footnotes moving through time. Set in the 1930s and early 1940s, a typical page of the book looks like the following:
Churchill visited Birmingham, where eight hundred people had been killed in a raid a few days earlier. It was the end of November 1940. “A very pretty young girl ran up to the car and threw a box of cigars into it,” Churchill later wrote, “I was very glad (in my official capacity) to give her a kiss. I then went on to see the long mass grave in which so many citizens and their children had been newly buried.”
That’s it. A line break and a new little story unfolding somewhere else in the world. Baker looks to fill in all the details that get wrung out of our current historical telling of World War II, many of which do not reflect well on the Allies. In this way, the book is a bit like Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, except much better. Better in the sense that the true story is shown - not given - and better in that the ideological shading is much harder to see.
Besides the structure, the other artistic choice is the scope Baker chose, both in terms of time and subject. The book focuses on the time period just after World War I and ends just after the entry of America into World War II, cutting the action of the war in half. You never see the liberation of the concentration camps, the use of the atom bomb, or D-Day. Its subjects are also somewhat oddly chosen, with emphasis on Churchill, Nazi High Command, European Jews, President Roosevelt, pacifists, and on the tactic of mass aerial bombing. Baker conspicuously underplays the Soviet Union, the use of tanks/blitzkrieg, the fall of France, the Japanese invasion of China, and Mussolini's Italy. While these events are mentioned, they are only mentioned briefly and without much depth.
The limited scope is what ultimately makes this book a piece of art rather than pure history. Baker has an argument, but he isn’t going to come out and tell you what it is. Human Smoke is not a total retelling of World War II and is not meant to be complete. Read between the lines, however, and what emerges is less the valiant heroes taught in civics class and more the very real and very fallible people who had to make decisions in times of war.
Aerial Bombing
More than anything else, this is a book about the love of bombing. Throughout every major event and decision, a bombing raid was always looming in the background. If it wasn’t a bombing raid, it was production numbers on bombers, or a look at the type of bombs that were dropped, or what new technology had developed to make bombers even deadlier. Questions were debated like: What was the right mix of incendiary versus traditional bombing? Were many smaller bombs better than just a few large ones? Should delayed fuse bombs be used to destroy emergency personnel and if so, how long should the fuse last?
It also appears that every political leader loved bombing. Churchill bombed the Nazis. The Nazis bombed the British. Stalin then bombed the Nazis from the East. The Japanese bombed the Chinese and the Chinese bombed them back. Then the Japanese bombed America at Pearl Harbor, bringing America officially into World War II.
While I think it’s always been implicitly stated by historians, Baker highlights something worth explicitly saying: every side targeted civilians through aerial bombardment. While officially every raid had some justification for reducing industrial output, the bombing raids were also a psychological tool to try and break the enemy’s will to fight. Even when spies would report that there was little to no effect on morale, the response from both Hitler and Churchill was simply that more bombers were needed.
From a military perspective, this strategy does make some sense. You risk relatively few men compared to the carnage of trench warfare and can inflict massive damage if you hit your target. Both Churchill and Hitler had served in World War I and the idea of not having a Verdun-style massacre appealed to them both. There was also the fact that the English Channel was once again playing its historical role in making a ground invasion by either side near impossible, therefore creating the massive focus on airpower.
The vignettes on the air war are the one constant throughout the book. If there was an atmosphere created by Baker, it is some combination of air-raid siren and spreadsheet detailing the number, type, and tonnage of bombs dropped that day.
Churchill
Churchill does not come off well, to put it mildly. As head of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister, Winston Churchill’s explicitly stated goal was the mass starvation of Europe through international blockade and the installation of abject terror through carpet bombing.
On blockades:
Churchill was the chief obstacle, Hoover wrote later. “He was a militarist of the extreme school who held that the incidental starvation of the women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory.”
“When Churchill succeeded Chamberlain as the Prime Minister in May, 1940, he soon stopped all permits of food relief to Poland.”
Churchill received countless reports on food scarcity in Europe and did everything in his power to ensure that people starved. This included but was not limited to: blockading food from America and other countries, firebombing farms, releasing invasive insects to eat crops, and spraying an early version of Agent Orange. Churchill was well aware that it would be the occupied territories that would bear the brunt of the starvation since Nazis would confiscate any food for the war effort. Churchill cynically viewed this as a positive development, believing it would make it more likely that people would rise up against the Nazis. This never happened.
Baker also goes to great lengths to show that Churchill was not a creature of his time or that he was somehow just following the advice of his generals. Once he was elected Prime Minister, Churchill ran the United Kingdom somewhat like a mini-dictatorship, giving no quarter to what he saw as “murderous Huns” being led by Hitler, a “wicked man, the repository and embodiment of many forms of soul-destroying hatreds.” He was a hands-on manager in all aspects of the war, directing everything from troop movements to negotiations with the Americans to the smallest details on weapons manufacturing.
Churchill on the Thickness of Shells:
The thinner-shelled , stronger-blasting German bombs had a charge-to-weight ratio of fifty-fifty. “These are not only more efficient for destroying cities,” Churchill wrote, “they are also cheaper.” Perhaps, the Prime Minister suggested, the charge-to-weight ratio of British bombs ought to be reconsidered - “especially now that the Air Ministry have asked for such a large increase in output.”
Churchill truly was a man of detail. And a political genius. And an alcoholic. And someone who believed that the war must be won at any cost, even if it meant millions would die.
Roosevelt
If Churchill comes off as a warmonger, Roosevelt is portrayed as more of a traditional two-faced politician. When running for reelection in 1940, he repeatedly said that he would not lead America into war.
Roosevelt on Entering the War:
“To Republicans and Democrats, to every man, woman, and child in the nation I say this: Your President and your Secretary of State are following the road to peace. We are arming ourselves not for any foreign war.”
This, of course, was a lie. FDR had begun the mass industrialization and armament of America years before and was actively selling everything from spam to B-24 Liberator bombers to the Allies. Sure, some isolationists and pacifists viewed this unprecedented military buildup as a sign, but who are you going to believe, FDR or your lying eyes?
He had a problem, however. FDR needed what we would now call a “pretext” for war.
On Entering the War:
Henry Stimson was writing in his diary. He, Knox, Stark, Hull, and Marshall had been in the Oval Office with the president, batting around a problem that Roosevelt had brought up. “The Japanese were likely to attack soon, perhaps next Monday,” the president said. “The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” Stimson wrote. “It was a difficult proposition.” It was November 25th, 1941.
FDR was slightly off; Pearl Harbor happened roughly two weeks later on a Sunday. Now I want to be clear since this conspiracy theory territory. There is no evidence that FDR knew the location of the attack on Pearl Harbor or when it would happen. Given the amount of damage to the American Navy, it is hard to believe that he would not have moved at least some ships to safety. FDR in no way, shape, or form allowed the attack on Pearl Harbor to happen.
It is also fairly clear, however, that FDR wanted America in the fight. He knowingly cut off oil supplies to Japan and would then sail tankers just off the Japanese coast. He was smuggling every known armament to Churchill in any way he could. I think it is safe to say given Henry Stimson’s first-person testimony and other actions FDR took, he wanted at least one overt attack against American shipping to give him the political cover necessary to declare war.
The fact is, FDR had already tipped his hand by retooling and transforming American industrial capacity, financing, and agricultural power. Even when the Allied countries bled their coffers dry, FDR then pushed extensively for the Lend-Lease Act, essentially allowing unlimited credit to be given for the purchase of American supplies over an undefined time period. The repayment method was left up to Roosevelt by any method he deemed satisfactory. As they say in finance, a nice deal if you can get it.
When the Japanese finally attacked, America was already on a war footing. Perhaps most telling was Churchill’s read of his American counterparts on hearing the news.
Churchill on Hearing about Pearl Harbor:
“They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor,” said Roosevelt. “We are all in the same boat now...” Both Americans, Churchill observed, took the news “with admirable fortitude. In fact, one might almost have thought they had been delivered from a long pain.”
Roosevelt had always known the score when it came to American involvement both pre and post-Pearl Harbor. He coordinated production, shared intelligence, and did everything in his power to both support the Allies and bring the American people around to the idea that once again, America would have to involve itself in a world war.
Pacifists
If the Allied commanders weren’t the good guys, then who was? In the afterword of the book, Baker writes:
I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They’ve never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right.
It’s the last sentence which is doing a bit too much work. While they certainly tried to save Jews, did send aid to Europe, and made diplomatic overtones to Japan, I don’t know if the world would have been better served by pacifists enforcing US military isolationism. It is always hard to argue a historical counterfactual, but with no United States intervention, Japan would likely have a large East Asian empire based on Japanese ethnic superiority. In Europe, either Nazi Germany survives along with fascist Italy or the Red Army wins and Stalin runs continental Europe. None of these scenarios seems particularly enticing. On the other hand, we do have the benefit of hindsight and now know that Japan, Italy, and Germany are all free democracies. This seems materially better.
The other surprising aspect of the pacifists was just how deeply some held their beliefs. I had always wondered what Gandhi would have done if he were born in Nazi Germany. Well, I now have my answer courtesy of Baker.
Gandhi on Pacifism:
Gandhi answered a letter from Hyim Greenberg, who edited the Jewish Frontier, a liberal Zionist newspaper in New York. Greenberg pointed out that in Germany, A Jewish Gandhi would last about five minutes before he was executed.
“That will not disprove my case,” Gandhi replied. “I can conceive the necessity of the immolation of hundreds, if not thousands, to appease the hunger of dictators.” The discipline of nonviolence- ahimsa - worked most efficaciously in the face of terrible violence,” Gandhi said: “Sufferers need not see the result in their lifetime.” It was May 22, 1939.
If we are going to be honest about the moral failings of the Allied commanders, I think it is also fair to point out the failings of the pacifists. When Indians laid down on railroad tracks, the British stopped the train. If Jews had laid down on German tracks, the conductor would have sped up. Given all the horrors that Gandhi knew at the time, it's hard for me to see how nonviolent protest would have stopped Hitler. Extreme pacifism in the face of extreme violence simply does not work. If anything, the Jews of Europe were too pacifist in their reaction to Nazi Germany.
Nazis
The Nazis didn’t just loathe the Jews, but looked at European Jewry almost like an engineering problem that needed to be solved. The Nazi high command, led by Hitler, really was megalomaniacal in their focus. Judaism was not a useful political foil to gain power, or a scapegoat, or any other story that has cropped up in recent years by far-right apologists. The Nazis, and the wider German population, truly hated the Jews. Most surprisingly was how organized the hate was - there were rules and procedures that needed to be followed, money that needed to be earmarked, and personnel allocated. You don’t just get a Holocaust, it needs to be built.
On Kristallnacht:
Party leaders called their subordinates, and the Gestapo sent out, by Teletype, rules to guide the rioting throughout Germany that was to the the consequence of Ernst vom Rath’s assassination. It was to be savage but orderly. The burning of synagogues was permitted “only if there is no danger of fires for the neighborhood.” Jewish homes and businesses “may be destroyed but not looted.” And foreigners “may not be molested even if they are Jews.”
Organized mob may sound like an oxymoron, but Nazi society really was controlled to an extreme extent. The Nazis had a problem, however, in that as they conquered more territory, the number of Jews under Nazi rule actually started to increase.
Thus began a series of experiments.
On Sterilization:
“One practical way of proceeding,” wrote Brack, “would be, for instance, to let the persons to be treated approach a counter, where they could be asked to answer some questions and fill in forms, which would take two or three minutes.” During that time, their gonads or their ovaries would be subjected to a high-radiation dose emanating from two hidden X-ray sources.
This method was ultimately looked at as too costly and too prone to discovery since the other skin around the genitalia would also become affected by the radiation. Furthermore, reducing the Jewish population over decades through sterilization was simply too slow for Hitler.
On Gassing:
Albert Wimann, a forensic chemist, and Arthur Nebe, the commander of an SS squad, went to an insane asylum and put two pipes through a bricked-in window. When the room was full of patients, they connected an idling car to one of the pipes. The patients didn’t die.
Traditional methods of gassing didn’t meet the lethality rates that Nazis needed, so more efficient forms would need to be invented. The SS also tried more tried-and-true forms of killing, like mass graves.
On Mass Graves:
Ten people were ordered to get in one of the ditches and lie down. They were told to lie in opposing directions - head, feet, head, feet. And then the policeman threw in grenades, which exploded. Pieces of bodies flew up. Anyone who was still alive after the grenades was shot. The men sprinkled lime and more straw, and the next group was made to lie down on the first layer of dead, blown-up people. More grenades exploded. In Lublin, Poland, that was how 450 Jews died - bombed by grenades at close range. It was October 1941.
Psychological issues started to crop up as soldiers had trouble shooting starving men, women, and children. It was also still not an efficient way to kill the millions Hitler wanted gone. Lastly, it left too much evidence for the Nazi High Command to feel comfortable.
The Nazis continued to refine the killing process until it was used on an industrial scale to achieve Hitler’s Final Solution, resulting in the death of over 6 million Jews.
European Jews
Despite what you may have been taught or heard in popular culture, the United States and Great Britain did not fight World War II to save the Jews. No country wanted them. None. Anti-semitism was also so not a uniquely German trait.
Anti-Semitism In Lithuania:
When Grolsh reached the far side of the river, he saw bodies hanging from the trees. A Lithuanian local explained that the people had already “taken care of things”: All the Jews in the town had been robbed and hung by fellow Lithuanians. “They had exploited the situation,” Grolsh saw. “Hitler is against the Jews anyway. We’ll kill them and then we’ll take all of their stuff.”
It wasn’t just Lithuanian peasants who hated the Jews, however. By today’s standards, Churchill sounds very much like an anti-semite. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt in that he usually would focus on Communist Jews, rather than the whole religion, but it does appear that he did not have a great love for Judaism. What we do know for a fact is that Churchill turned away millions of European Jews seeking asylum. We also know that of the Jews that made it to Britain, most were eventually rounded up and put into camps because Churchill believed they might be foreign infiltrators.
Churchill on Jewish Foreign Nationals:
Telegrams went out to the chief constables of the English county where German paratroopers might land. It was May 11, 1940. Churchill wanted German and Austrian aliens locked up. Hundreds of people, then thousands, most of them Jewish refugees, were marched by soldiers with fixed bayonets to prison.
There was never any evidence against any of the prisoners, just a general fear because they were German. Of course, Churchill was in charge of an empire where the sun never set, so surely they could find room somewhere?
Churchill on Palestinian Jews:
A group of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria were put on a boat in the harbor of Haifa, Palestine. With Churchill’s approval, British forces were deporting the Jews from Palestine, where they’d arrived illegally after many hardships.
Yes, you read that correctly. Churchill was deporting Jews from Palestine. Places as far away as Madagascar and Siberia were looked at as possible homes, but no country was willing to cede any territory or take in millions of refugees. This includes the United States.
Roosevelt on Immigration Quotas:
“They ask that the immigration quota of German Jews to this country be increased from 2,500 to 5,000. This, of course, is almost a negligible number.”
Roosevelt’s stiff reply - drafted by the State Department - said that there was no immigration quota for “persons in the class described.” The State Department had, however, issued 5,117 immigration visas to natives of Germany in 1935: Felix Warburg’s request was thus already granted.
Five thousand per year is a shockingly low number given the size of the United States. This policy was not something that was an afterthought, and FDR had numerous opportunities to reverse course, or at the very least take in more Jews.
Roosevelt on Relocation:
A reporter asked if he felt that there was any place in the world that would be able to take a mass emigration of the Jews from Germany.
“I have given a great deal of thought to it,” said the president.
“Can you tell us any place particularly desirable?” the reporter asked.
“No,” the president answered, “the time is not ripe for that.”
Another reporter asked the president if he would recommend a relaxation of the immigration restrictions so that Jewish refugees could come to the United States.
“That is not in contemplation,” said Roosevelt. “We have the quota system.”
Perhaps if the adults can’t be saved, at least the US would take in Jewish children, right?
Roosevelt on the Wagner-Rogers Child Refugee Bill:
A member of the House of Representative, Caroline O’Day, tried to reach President Roosevelt to ask him what he thought of the child-refugee bill, which was still alive in committee.
Roosevelt’s secretary passed on O’Day’s message. Roosevelt wrote “File No action FDR.” Without his support, the bill - and the children - had no chance. It was June 2, 1939
It’s important to note that FDR was very well aware of the virulent antisemitism of the Nazis and of mass atrocities being committed against them. According to the Holocaust Museum, “Approximately 125,000 Germans, most of them Jewish, immigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1945.” That’s a little more than 10,000 per year, a drop in the bucket compared to the total population of European Jews. No matter how you look at it, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the countries of the world shut their doors to the Jews, knowing full well what would happen to them.
Why You Should Read This Book
It’s important to confront uncomfortable truths. History is rarely black and white and when we hide that history, it makes our future decision-making less accurate. It is a good thing to change one's mind, and it’s hard to overstate how much this book changed my mind when it comes to Churchill and Roosevelt. Both were given ample, repeated opportunities to save millions of people and chose not to. The amount of human flourishing that was snuffed out is truly unimaginable.
It’s also hard to read this book and not think about current events. I’m not going to tell you how to feel or what to believe when it comes to aerial bombing, or immigration, or even war itself. I will tell you that reading this book adds both depth and color to those issues in a way just reading a newspaper or watching television simply can’t. For that alone, it is worth the price of admission.
On the Title:
The title comes from Franz Halder, one of Hitler’s restive but compliant generals. General Halder told an interrogator that when he was imprisoned in a concentration camp late in the war, he saw flakes of smoke blow into his cell. Human smoke, he called it.